Nightmares for Many are Very, Very Scary

[Lionel]

Many years ago in the old Hall of Indians at the Carnegie Museum in Oakland, a little girl came upon a statue of a Lakota Sioux warrior. He was a fearsome sight, at least 8 feet tall, wearing only a loin cloth, his war-painted face frozen in a grimace, in one hand a scalp, in the other a bloody butcher knife.The little girl had grown up hearing stories from her mother about the atrocities that Native Americans had suffered at the hands of white European settlers, and that night, she had a nightmare -- that all the Indians ever killed by the white man came back to life to seek revenge, led by the warrior from the Carnegie Museum. "They were stampeding down Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill, millions of them, and they were heading straight to my house," remembered the woman, now grown, who didn't want her name used. She tried everything to get rid of the nightmare. Some nights, in desperation, she would pay her little sister a nickel to crawl into bed with her, or place her stuffed dog at the window to scare the warriors away. This went on for close to three years until the nightmare finally vanished, for a simple reason: the little girl grew up. Now she can laugh about it -- a little. "For several years after that, though, I couldn't watch a cowboy movie without being scared to death," she said.

Nightmares are with us almost from birth, and last throughout our lives. Many very young children have them repeatedly, and then, as their brains learn to process the images that bombard them throughout the day, the nightmares fade in intensity and frequency. "When children grow older, they develop the cognitive ability to separate dreams from reality," said noted California sleep disorder expert Alan Siegel, "and they have more of a chance of making that distinction upon waking up. They're better able to reassure themselves and be more amenable to accepting help from adults." Very often, though, adults need help and reassurance too.

View: Full Article | Source: Post Gazette